There’s now a booming outlet for fanfic, including stories “portraying a near future where the Trump administration has criminalized selfies, radicalizing Kim Kardashian as a freedom fighter for women’s rights.” The Toronto startup Wattpad has moved the online subculture closer to the mainstream publishing world, and former AFC editor Rea McNamara has written a fascinating profile on the subculture and its transition. [NOW]

The Broad’s upcoming exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors is expected to be a huge blockbuster when it opens on October 21. The museum announced yesterday that they’ll be pre-selling all 50,000 tickets for the show online on September 1st at noon. I’d be worried about servers crashing from that volume of traffic. [Los Angeles Times]

In other L.A. news, Art Battle just took place in the Arts District and it sounds like it was terrible. It’s a live painting competition, which involved lots of paintings of pop culture things, dollar signs, hearts, and someone named “Art Barbie”. [artnet News]

Wow. Add this to the bucket list: the late French sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle left behind a 14 acre sculpture park in Tuscany inspired by Gaudi’s Park Güell. Her “Tarot Garden” is populated by giant goddess figures and a feminist takes on the tarot deck. This looks really cool. [Artsy]

Hong Kong high school students just set a world record for a display of 1,214 3D-printed sculptures of buildings from the city’s skyline. It kinda looks like a Won Ju Lim installation! (The 3D printing marathon was organized to celebrate the anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to mainland Chinese rule… which has been a less than great thing so far for the city’s pro-democracy activists, but that’s another story). [South China Morning Post]

Congrats to Cindy Cheng, winner of the 2017 Sondheim Prize of $25,000. (As a curator, I’ve worked with Cheng before and can vouch that she totally deserves it!) Here, Angela N. Carroll, Bret McCabe, and Cara Ober discuss all the finalists. [BmoreArt]

Those calling for the censorship of Dana Schutz’s “Open Casket” will be happy to know that the painting has been removed from view. They’ll likely be disappointed to know it’s for a logistical reason as boring as a water leak. The real story here seems to be that the museum’s brand-spanking-new downtown digs is taking on water. Cue the Titanic/iceberg jokes. [Hyperallergic]

Melania Trump’s official White House portrait is here, and it kinda looks like she’s an out-of-focus hologram. The internet is having lots of fun with this one. [New York Magazine]

A cast believed by some to be from a long-lost Degas mold will go on view in London. Meanwhile in Hong Kong, Sotheby’s just proved Basquiats are hot commodities no matter the continent. Expect to see more of his work heading to Asian private collections. [The Telegraph]

Artist and blogger Greg Allen has started a Kickstarter project, OurGuernica, After Our Picasso. The purpose of this initiative: raising funds to commission an anonymous Chinese artist to paint Angela Merkel giving Ivanka Trump side-eye (photo above) in the style of former-president-now-painter George W. Bush. That’s a lot of layers to unpack for what is essentially a meme. [Artspace]

This sounds like so much fun. The Museum of Sex has opened a fully-functional pop-up disco bar for their exhibition of Bill Bernstein’s New York nightlife photos. [The New York Times]

According to Mark Hudson, the Tate Britain’s Queer British Art 1861-1967 “begs the question of whether we’re in for art that tells the story of homosexuality in Britain over the 150 years leading up to the legal landmark, or art by artists who just happen to be gay. Judging by the first room, devoted to the late 19th century Aesthetic Movement, the exhibition might have been better titled Screamingly Camp Art.” Sounds like a missed opportunity all-around. [The Telegraph]

Bad news (for those of us prone to soul-crushing fair fatigue): Brooklyn is getting a Frieze Week art fair. The good news: it will be an off-shoot of SPRING/BREAK, focused on large-scale public installations and environments. SPRING/BREAK is one of the only fairs we can can handle more of. [artnet News]

Snøhetta’s Lascaux IV Caves Museum in southern France is open and looks (as expected) like an anthropology museum from the future. Their treatment of the cave painting reproductions is a really interesting display strategy. For preservation reasons, you can’t visit the real thing, but the museum has managed hyper-accurate reproductions that never try to trick you into thinking they’re the originals. [Dezeen]

Bronx Commons, an affordable housing complex coming to the Bronx along with a performance space, was supposed to include set-aside apartments for aging musicians being priced out of the borough. Now, the developers are being told that policy might violate fair housing laws. This is a bad precedent for affordable artist housing. [Curbed]

Artist James Bridle has designed a salt circle (like in witchcraft) to trap self-driving cars. This is so good. [The Creators Project]

White Mule Framing Inc. is auctioning off pretty much everything they own. This includes vouchers for future framing work. The business has decided to move out of Manhattan due to rising rents and is auctioning off their inventory to raise money for a down payment on a forever home. That’s a pretty smart move. [32 Auctions]

Looks like we’re going to have to check out Lynn Hershman Leeson’s work at Bridget Donahue. Photos from this show pique curiosity. [Contemporary Art Daily]

A.E. Benenson considers Sean Raspet’s faux-food innovations as the conceptual grandchild of the Bauhaus’s optimism—a foil to a not-so-distant, cynical Silicon Valley dystopia. Paddy and I weren’t so happy with the non-food’s texture and chemical-y taste. We tried it at Frieze last year. To quote myself, the gel in a tube had “notes of past-due seafood kimchee with a squirt of toothpaste.” [Art in America]

Pace announces it will open a second gallery in Hong Kong during the Art Basel Hong Kong art fair. [artnet News]

After Anish Kapoor secured the exclusive rights to light-absorbing pigment Vantablack, artist Stuart Semple created “The World’s Pinkest Pink,” which is available to everyone except Kapoor. Kapoor responded to this dig with the above Instagram photo, wherein his middle finger is dipped in Semple’s pigment. This seems like the kind of drama one wouldn’t expect Kapoor to have time for. [artnet News]

Beginning with David Bowie, J. Kelly Nestruck looks back at artists who died in 2016 and the ways in which they “performed” their deaths. [The Globe and Mail]

George Michael died this weekend. Here’s a look at why he mattered beyond the music. Think making gayness more interesting and less threatening, and erasing the barrier between who should and should not sing a soul song. [The New York Times]

Photographer Wing Shya’s aesthetic emerged about two decades ago, while working as an on-set photographer for filmmaker Wong Kar Wai during Hong Kong cinema’s golden age. Today, his gorgeous photos maintain a cinematic quality, even as the city’s culture and economy stagnate under mainland Chinese rule. [CNN]

Famed minimalist and art critic Donald Judd amassed a tomb of writing over his life, but never used a typewriter. This news comes in a profile by Randy Kennedy on a new collection of the artist’s writings and his children’s role in shepherding the project. [The New York Times]

Best new architecture in NYC. In a surprise to no one, Santiago Calatrava’s Oculus makes the list, but not without some heavy caveating. (Late opening, political tomfoolery, shopping mall effect, etc.) [Curbed]

Great. The GOP is connecting Democratic senate candidates in New York to Mayor de Blasio and corruption wherever possible. And of course, it’s an easy attack to launch because the administration has been plagued by corruption. [Politico]

The New York Times profiles Participant Inc founder Lia Gangitano. Why can’t everyone in the art world be this cool? [The New York Times]

Want to spend over $3,000 on drawing supplies? Try the KARLBOX. It’s a collaboration between Karl Lagerfeld and Faber-Castell and it’s just as ridiculous as it sounds. [CNN]

Laurie Simmons made a film called My Art, which seems vaguely-autobiographical and really, really bad. [The Hollywood Reporter]

A Menashe Kadishman sculpture in suburban Tel Aviv, Birth, has become a bizarre site of pilgrimage for Orthodox women who sit on it and pray for fertility. They claim the artwork has mystical powers, which is probably one of the most unique public receptions to a piece of contemporary sculpture. [artnet News]

According to the rumor mill, the new iPhone won’t have a headphone jack but it will be waterproof. Are that many people dropping their phones in the toilet? [The New York Times]

A battery operated sculpture featured in a Kanye West video that features 12 naked pop stars and political figures in bed together including Taylor Swift and Donald Trump does not cost 4 million dollars. The sculpture, currently on view at Blum & Poe in Culver City, was early reported by the Times to be for sale, but now the gallery press representative claims the piece is not for sale. Unless, of course, the right buyer comes along. We’re just going to go ahead and speculate that West, a self-described genius, is waffling on the sales strategy and price. [The Los Angeles Times]

For those who thought that the Gawker suit was a one off case: Roger Ailes is hinting at a suit against New York Magazine for their feature on him and the long history of sexual harassment allegations that have followed his career. He’s retained Charles J. Harder for the case, the lawyer funded by Peter Thiel for the Hogan Gawker case. [Politico]

Because of heightened security surrounding the US Open tennis championships, the neighboring Queens Museum has decided to close until 9/11. This sucks. [ARTnews]

Iceland is home to lots of utopian-looking modernist churches. Combined with the stark landscape, these would be great locations for a sci-fi movie. [Dezeen]

Developers Henderson Land are building a 24-story building in Hong Kong with the goal of leasing to high-end gallerists looking for quality exhibition space. Hong Kong has a notorious property shortage, particularly spaces suitable for art galleries. The new building has high ceilings and a crane for moving artwork, and tenants such as David Zwirner and Pace have already signed on. [Financial Times]

This GIF from Carl Burton was inspired by Hong Kong’s “Umbrella Movement,” where thousands of pro-democracy protesters took to the streets in 2014. Those activists carried umbrellas as a means to defend themselves from water cannons and pepper spray, often sleeping on the street for weeks at a time.

As totally fucked as our two party electoral system and its bizarre delegate loopholes and what-not are, thinking about China’s one-party system does put things in perspective. Countless people are literally dying to vote.

Tomorrow, New Yorkers, please go to the polls. Call in sick if you’re scheduled to work. Even if the line is long, or you think the election is rigged, or the media told you your candidate doesn’t have a chance. The electoral process is the one thing that can’t be protested by boycott.

If you ask someone how the art market is doing in Hong Kong, get ready for an earful. We’re unfortunately not in town for Art Basel, so we can’t speak to that topic first-hand. But as a person with internet access, I’ve been bombarded with more contradictory facts and opinions (let’s be honest, mostly opinions) about the state of the unstable Chinese economy, the tastes of the Asian art market, and the manic-depressive cycles of art fair outlooks than I ever thought I’d need to know.

Below, we’ve aggregated some of the uneven reporting on Art Basel Hong Kong, including some quotes from director Adeline Ooi and other industry experts, to get a better idea of just what China’s market troubles mean for the art world:

Art collective Meow Wolf has convinced investors, including Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin, to help them acquire and transform a Santa Fe bowling alley. When it opens, the space will be a psychedelic Victorian interior with maze-like secret passageways to sci-fi landscapes. It sounds insane. [Los Angeles Times]

At LA’s new Broad Museum, all of the floor staff receive 40 hours of training to become “Visitors Services Associates”. That means the people taking your ticket or guarding the artworks are also paid to talk to you about the art, like a docent. I’m not sure if this sounds great or super annoying. [NPR]

M+, Hong Kong’s newest contemporary art museum, is pretty ballsy. The institution is hosting a pre-opening exhibition entitled Four Decades of Chinese Contemporary Art that sounds as if it’s curated to piss off mainland censors—showing everything from artwork about Tiananmen Square to sculptures by persona non grata Ai Weiwei. Although the former British colony enjoys different freedoms from the rest of China, Beijing has been cracking down on dissidents. This is going to be a culture war battle to watch. [The Guardian]

DIA’s new director Jessica Morgan sounds awesome. The institution is back to showing artwork in NYC after she scrapped multi-year renovation plans, and more importantly, she’s a curator artists respect and like working with. [Vogue]

In other glamorous curator news, Stacy Engman has been accused of assaulting a fellow passenger on a flight from Istanbul to New York, where she was reportedly wearing a tiara and bit the other woman. Where’s the Vogue photoshoot for this? [artnet News]

Apparently Ken Griffin dropped $500 million on paintings by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning before the market cooled off. This would be a record for a private sale. [The Telegraph]

The Kalamazoo Institute of Arts will be free for over a month as a gesture of goodwill following the mass shooting in the area. [mlive]

Thomas Schütte is designing and building his own museum to show and house his own work. [artnet News]

It reminds us of this depressed penguin from Werner Herzog’s “Encounters at the End of the World”. [Youtube]

Fergus McCaffrey has announced that he’s opening a second gallery location on the island of St. Barthélemy this November. The gallery notes that the island has held an artist colony since the sixties, hosting artists like Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, Brice Marden, and Francesco Clemente. In that tradition McCaffrey had already co-established an artist residency and gallery there from 2005-2008. The next logical step, we think, would be to fly some writers down for the tour. [Our inboxes]

Strange. The lede to this article makes artist David Hockney sounds like a grumpy old man complaining that art has become “less” through conceptual art, as it “gave up on images.” Watch the 4-minute video, though, and he sounds a lot cheerier and doesn’t talk so much about conceptual art. [BBC]

Laure Provost on art and life: “I know I’m never going to fully grasp life in my art. It’s never as good as having the sun on your face. Even if you film someone with the sun on their face it feels as if you’ve lost something. ” [Frieze, behind the paywall]

Prepare to die inside when reading “Blouin Lifestyle Picks” on ArtInfo. “Picks” include Burmese rubies, Colombian emeralds, and a diamond ring with “baguette-cut diamond shoulders” (whatever that means). Maybe their readership is made up of lords, ladies, and the richest Kardashians?[ArtInfo]

In Hong Kong, thousands of students are occupying the streets in a very orderly fashion. They are calling for democratic reforms by sitting outside, cleaning up after themselves, recycling, and doing their homework in public. Amazing. [The Independent]

And of course the city’s art fairs will go on in the face of protests, reports Kelly Crow. [Twitter]